Recently I was asked to take another look at a violin I have known for many years. It has the outward appearance of being late-Cremonese work by Lorenzo Storioni, except that in almost every critical detail it fails to satisfy any of the key factors that would enable a Cremonese attribution. Esteemed colleagues have suggested that it comes from Central Italy, perhaps around Perugia, and I cannot doubt it, but whatever it is the first time I laid eyes on it, I bet that someone had put a Storioni label in it… and lo-and-behold I was right! Whilst the violin remains something of a mystery, other colleagues had suggested that the label may indeed be an authentic one, perhaps removed from another violin, or compelling evidence to re-think the attribution, so I was glad to see it again with all of this in mind.
Here are my findings: The label was printed using moveable type of a roman-type font in a letterpress, leaving physical impressions of the letters that are consistent with this method. The paper is old, and overall there are perfectly good reasons to accept it as a convincing label. All the same…
The Paper: Most of the time we expect old labels to be on laid paper. The paper pulp is placed on a wire sieve that creates widely spaced chain lines (normally presenting as vertical lines) and narrow laid lines (horizontal) which is what we see on this label. This would be perfectly good for Stradivari, Amati and many 18th century makers, but after the invention of wove paper in 1756 things are no longer quite as certain. The only genuine Storioni labels that I have seen and noted are made of wove paper. I would not consider this to be an absolute deciding factor because both kinds of paper were manufactured concurrently, and because I haven’t seen an exhaustive number of genuine Storioni labels to know that they were always on wove paper. Nevertheless, I have in my book collection contemporaneous Cremonese pamphlets printed on wove paper. So, detecting laid paper as you will see in the image below, is cause to question.
Printing Method Amongst genuine Italian labels, there seem to be times when they are printed properly by a professional printer, and times when makers got hold of individual bits of type and improvised their own methods of printing. Stradivari interestingly seems to have done both, and certainly owned some individual bits, because the star mark that is impressed onto the pegbox of the Messiah, and onto several of his moulds is from a piece of printer’s type. In Storioni’s case, the typesetting in those that I have seen is very consistent, there is no excess of ink, and no uneveness in the impressions of the letters. This is all consistent with good quality printing from a proper printing press. This label has poor typesetting leading both to uneven impressions, and to ill-formed letters where the ink has not fully covered the surface of the text, all suggesting an improvised method of assembling the type and printing. There is an excess of ink, which has bled out around some of the letters which is further evidence of improvisation. Again, we cannot know if Storioni, like Stradivari, did both. Again, this allows us to express legitimate doubt about the label, although I do not think it provides conclusive evidence.
Font types There are various families of Roman fonts used around Europe, all stemming from the late-fifteenth century. In Italy the Bembo family of fonts dominated printing, with modifications through the centuries. Here we see the capital letters L[orentius] and C[remonæ] form more-or-less a square, the “æ” is formed rather like a figure-of-eight as a continuous line, rather than as two letters squashed together. When we compare the suspect label, although it is derived from a Roman font that is substanitally similar, we see that the L and C are rationalised so that they are more-or-less the same width as other capital letters.
From the 1720s through to the 1760s the English type-founder, William Caslon (whose tomb is found in the graveyard of LSO St Luke’s) produced a new family of re-cut and revised fonts, in which the rationalisation of the Roman capital letters so that most (excepting I, M, Q and W) occupied the same space so the widths of the capital letters immediately draw us to this mid-eighteenth century re-assessment of the Renaissance-Roman fonts. The result is a shortening of the L and the C to more-or-less the same width as the S[torioni]. Another pointer is the triangular serif on the upper part of the C. We see here too that the ‘counter’ of the e in æ is a horizontal line, rather than extending from the a, which is another helpful point of difference. In short, we are looking at an English font, or pedantically an English version of a French version of a Roman font, for luckily we have specimen sheets published by William Caslon, and in this case we have his recutting of the Robert Granjon’s Brevier Roman of the 1550s. Given the quality of the printing which I have already mentioned, it it difficult to make many further comparisons because of the misshapen letterforms which are due to over-inking or under-inking depending on unevenness of the type.
The manuscript After all of this, we can examine the writing. At least in the 1793 example, Storioni has used an ink made from soot, giving the strong black colour. I don’t know if this is consistent, but we see the sepia tones typical of oak-gall ink for the “96” Whilst the label is printed using printer’s ink mixture – essentially soot and linseed oil, the last digits are written in a slightly sepia tone which is probably oak-gall ink. I think it would be too presumptuous to be critical of the differences in the hand, as it seems that the genuine label suffers from being on slighly rough paper. The number 9 is formed with the same round and straight sweep, and this follows through into the six. We already know that the label is a forgery, it would not surprise me to discover that these numbers are a far-better copy of Storioni’s hand than we might be tempted to think.
Tentative Conclusion: The faults in the typography of these labels are remarkably similar to those that I identify with the Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu copies found in Jack Lott’s work. However, Lott’s associates include the ever elusive brother, George Lott, Maucotel, Boullangier, Edward Withers, John Day and others. I have recently also seen an instrument with a Felice Beretta label in it that had all the hallmarks of being a composite by Lott. There has been no faking whatsoever to this instrument, except a slight widening of the soundholes – possibly as a result of damage by a soundpost setter, but possibly to give the instrument the associated ‘roughness’ of Storioni. Nevertheless, when compared with these other examples, the finger of blame seems to fall soundly in the direction of Lott and his London associates.
